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Engaging Today's Students with the Liberal Arts |
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Faculty Seminar on Interdisciplinary Studies Beloit College |
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I received an ACM Engagement Project grant for two initiatives. The first was an interdisciplinary faculty-staff seminar led by our 2003-4 Fulbright Scholar, Wanjiku Chiuri. Professor Chiuri, who is from Kenya, focused the seminar on "poverty." During weekly sessions, the group of thirty participants worked to understand the complex causes and possible solutions to local and global poverty. Participants included faculty from economics, psychology, biology, political science, women's studies, education, literary studies, computer science, physics, and religious studies as well as staff from Field and Career Services, International Education, and Accounting. All participants received a book, Rural Development, by Robert Chambers, and faculty received a stipend. The seminar did not focus explicitly on the liberal arts. However, its interdisciplinary and experiential orientation modeled liberal arts learning and problem solving. Professor Chiuri and the seminar's participants brought multiple disciplinary perspectives to bear on analyzing poverty. For most of the meetings, Professor Chiuri was accompanied by a Beloit College alumna who now works actively in the community. This "expert," Sheila DeForest-Davis, unquestionably promoted college-city collaborations and provided faculty and staff with models for experiential education. The second initiative will be a working conference on October 28 and 29 for ACM and GLCA faculty/staff. The focus of the conference has shifted since 2003. I had proposed that there be a workshop for faculty and staff who directed or were planning interdisciplinary centers at liberal arts colleges. While I hope that such people will still participate, and I plan to devote at least one session to the function of centers on our campuses, the conference will have a more specific focus: public scholarship. Here is the description of the conference I have sent to ACM and GLCA Deans: "Building on the foundation laid out by programs of service learning in higher education, public scholarship seeks to strengthen the public role and democratic purposes of liberal arts education through publicly engaged academic work and the critical reflection on the ethical outcomes of that work. During the working conference, we will consider issues of cultural competencies, differential access to resources, democratic processes, institutional constraints, local histories, and larger cultural/political contexts of our community-based work. We will also share best practices in building and implementing collaborative projects with partners in the public and non-profit arenas. Delineating the unique roles and assets of liberal arts colleges can play in the development of public scholarship are central to this working-conference." As with the faculty/staff seminar, this conference will promote the liberal arts through experiential and interdisciplinary education. Diane Lichtenstein, Associate Dean of the College |
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Return to: Engagement Project |
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